The Beckhams: Four children too many
The Beckhams, and others like London mayor Boris Johnson, are very bad role models with their large families. There’s no point in people trying to reduce their carbon emissions and then increasing them 100% by having another child.
~ Simon Ross, chief executive of UK-based Optimum Population Trust, criticizing the birth of David and Victoria Beckham’s fourth child, Harper Seven (pictured above right), as quoted by the UK Guardian, July 17
[Photo via Victoria Beckham’s Twitter feed. HT Laura Loo]
Jul.25, 2011 6:00 am |
Population |
Jill Stanek is a nurse turned speaker, columnist and blogger, a national figure in the effort to protect both preborn and postborn innocent human life.
And here we see the full flower of the agenda behind the dubious science of “climate change”. It has always been about population reduction. This is pan animism–love mother earth more than humanity, which is a false dichotomy from the outset.
Anti-human, anti-Christ.
The devil hates the Incarnation, Baptism, and the Eucharist, because Christ has redeemed human flesh.
Robert at bioethike.com
That’s a quote that Harper doesn’t need to see later in life. Disgusting.
Mr. Ross could greatly reduce carbon emissions by keeping his big ignorant mouth shut.
It’s the second quote I’ve seen this week criticizing them for having a 4th child.
Population control nutters are the nuttiest nutters. Great comment, Gerard!!
Welcome to the world little one! Or not…
How about Simon offset the child’s Carbon emissions by stepping in front of a bus?
No.. I didn’t really mean that.
I would like to set up camp across the street from Ross with my seven kids. I think I would start a camp fire that would burn 24/7, run fans for each member of the family, leave a hose on all the time for drinking water, and use a whole can of hairspray (not the CFC free kind) to do my hair every morning. How long do you think it would take him to lose it completely?
Wow, Kristen… way to demonstrate your point by making his point…..
Listen, climate change is real, ladies and gentlemen. Does that mean we should limit the number of children a family should have? Absolutely not. Never ever. Does that mean families like Kristen’s should REALLY make an extra special effort to reduce their carbon footprint? I would hope they would but obviously there is no accounting for a lack of education.
LOL. Shhh, don’t tell these pop-control nuts that WE are having a fourth (going to have one last kid before we lose our health insurance). I don’t know why these people get so upset. It doesn’t matter if a few people have three or more kids because there are plenty of people who don’t and won’t have any. We’re just replacing them population-wise, what’s the difference?
It doesn’t matter if a few people have three or more kids because there are plenty of people who don’t and won’t have any. We’re just replacing them population-wise, what’s the difference?
That’s a good point. The U.S. birthrate has actually declined, and in most of Europe and the developed countries of Asia, it’s not even at replacement level.
oh wow, how dare they CHOOSE to add a fourth child! They got a girl that they wanted after three boys. I bet she’ll be a soccer player like dad and love music, though probably not the Spice Girls type music.
How dare my brother and his wife have their 4th child a year ago. How dare my sister in law’s sister and her husband add a fourth child to their own family this year!
The world is not overpopulated. many countries are not even at replacement levels in births.
I say David and Victoria should add a few more kids to spite this man! ;)
Kristen – he already has lost it completely.
If they truly believed the climate/population problem was real, then they would either commit suicide or cheer on those who take pro-active measures to reduce the population: that is – killers. For instance, wouldn’t 9/11 be seen as a good thing in their eyes? Or the Holocaust as well as Stalin and Mao’s eliminations be seen as great social successes?
Luckily, derrr, Big Families Are the New Green!
How rude of him. I just don’t understand how someone CAN’T be excited about a baby being born. My little sister’s friend is having a C-section today and I’m ecstatic! And I don’t even really know her!
And yes, population replacement rates are getting dangerously low in many countries. So what gives if some people have more than others? I find it ironic how our culture says, “Have whatever you want and as much as you want!” to most things like sex, food, and substances, but when it comes to children, “You have too much! That’s enough!”
It doesn’t matter if a few people have three or more kids because there are plenty of people who don’t and won’t have any. We’re just replacing them population-wise, what’s the difference?
Because poulation controllers are anti-human and they want less people all around.
They want just enough people to be slaves of the state, but not too many because less is easier to control. Also, smaller families over time not only means less sons and daughters, but also less nieces and nephews, less grandchildren and so on. If people have fewer familial relationships then they are more open to government control and have more allegiance to the state. Sort of like a “socialist utopia.”
Wow. (Re: original article) Absolute lunacy, rarefied to an exquisite purity.
It’s rude for the guy to pick on the fourth kid. It’s accurate of him to address the Carbon Footprint of all of humanity. We need to be responsible for that. How many planet Earth’s would it take to sustain all of humanity if we all lived at your footprint level?
http://www.carbonfootprint.com/calculator.aspx
Maybe you should find out before you criticize.
Er… Duck: may I ask exactly what you’d mean by “responsible”, in this case? Would you (personally) forbid more than 6 children? 8? It’s rather easy to use handsome-sounding warnings while remaining vague enough to evade awkward questions…
Sorry Paladin, didn’t mean to be ambiguous. I don’t care how many kids you have. I care about your family’s carbon footprint regardless of the size.
All right… but (even taking the assumptions that the website-designing people assume as “given and proven”–which is not really the case) isn’t it the case that every additional human would “add an additional carbon burden”?
(Incidentally, I looked at the “carbon footprint calculator” from your link… but when it asks for energy consumption, for example, it doesn’t indicate a time unit! Do they want consumption per day, month, year?)
carbon footprint…blah blah blah…
Population control is disgusting. Eugenics is disgusting.
I congratulate the Beckhams on their baby girl and wish them years of happiness with her and her three brothers.
Hey, no people, no pollution. What’s wrong with that? Give the earth a break….let’s just kill everyone.
My God, what monsters we have become.
(*sigh, nodding sadly at Liz’s and HisMan’s comments*)
This whole ball of nonsense really typifies a people who’ve lost all hope, and lost belief in anything but this short, material life… and in doing so, they cut the ground out from under any stable moral code they might hope to keep (for themselves, or for their children–if they have any children, that is). It’s heartbreaking.
“How can there be too many children? That’s like saying there are too many flowers.” -Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta
CC, until you can make a post minus the inflammatory religious slander, your comments will remain unpublished.
I think people should be able to have all the kids they want naturally. IVF is wrong. When you try to impregnate a woman who is not physically ready “for whatever reason” to be pregnant the resulting child is often born with serious birth defects and medical issues. My sisters sister-in-law had IVF done and she became pregnant with twins… they were born 2 months early with all kinds of medical problems and I always want to ask her why she didn’t just adopt, but my sister won’t let me…
Paladin says: “How can there be too many children? That’s like saying there are too many flowers.” -Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta
When those children are all starving… there are too many children.
Same thing as the Tower of Babel. If only we could build ourselves up to God’s level, then we could be God. Control who gets to be born, control when people die, control the weather, raise up the leaders of each nation ourselves, shower fortunes on those we deem worthy,…
The UK elected repesentative, Caroline Lucas, pulls the old “discuss” trick: ‘we need to have a discussion about family size.’
This is the same trick the elitist totalitarians like to play to make themselves sound fair and reasonable, as if they just want to note a problem and discuss various options. This was John Holdren’s answer when his 1977 ecology textbook, with all of its talk of mandatory sterilization, birth control in the water, and so on, was pointed out to him at the time our president Obama was naming Holdren as Science Czar.
Obama’s Regulatory Csar Cass Sunstein calls these things little “nudges:” let’s just nudge people to behave the way we want them to behave. How could anyone get upset about a little nudge?
I am glad this editorial came out, and about the Beckhams, of all people. The mask is off. These are elistist totalitarians who hold 99% of the rest of the world’s population in contempt. They love the concept of ‘humanity,’ but they don’t like us. All we do is mess up their planet.
I note how those most concerned about the carbon footprints of tiny babies don’t commit suicide and reduce their much larger footprints. Not that human activity has any appreciable impact on the environment, which a significant body of literature shows.
I was similarly excoriated for having a second child when she was born. This was done by a physicist at a Christmas party. I cordially invited him and all of his similarly minded friends to all hold hands and jump from the George Washington Bridge in order to make way for my growing family. That’s as much civility as such people deserve.
You know what the really stupid thing about ‘carbon footprint’ is? You literally can’t add carbon to the environment. It’s a 1:1 exchange. During their lives plants make oxygen and store carbon at a 1:1 molecule ratio. When a plant dies it released the carbon (be that by decay, burning, being eaten and absorbed, or turning into coal/oil/other and being consumed.) You can trade carbon from being in the ground to being in the air, but that doesn’t ‘add’ carbon, it just gets it a little closer to the natural ‘balance’. There was a huge die off of plants to produce the oil/coal/shale/peat/etc that we burn today, but that means before those plants got ‘locked away’ the air used to have a higher concentration of carbon (co2) and the ground used to have less. (Still the same overall amount of oxygen though). A 1:1 system is closed, the same amount of carbon and oxygen has always existed on this planet, and planting more trees won’t produce ‘more’ oxygen, just like burning more fuel won’t produce ‘less’ oxygen (or more co2). Co2 is a necessity of healthy plant life, greenhouses raise their co2 to produce more and healthy plant production. Returning our atmosphere to an earlier mixture of O2/CO2 *might* warm the planet some (after all, we are still recovering from the ice age, which even the most rabid global warm-ers deny) but it will hardly harm us. It might require some shifts in cities or populations, but that has always happened, the Sahara used to be forested farmland for heavens sake, and that change happened long before industrialized man. It’s not even argued that the planet used to be far more lush and warm than it is today, so, even if you believe that we are returning ‘unprecedented’ CO2 amounts *back* to the atmosphere, why would you worry about it?
Jespren: You literally can’t add carbon to the environment.
What makes the difference is the amount in the atmosphere. Going back hundreds of thousands of years, the level fluctuated between 180 and 300 parts per million. The Industrial Revolution changed this, and we’re up to about 390 ppm now. You’re right that plants use carbon dioxide, and many plants are growing faster now than they did 40 years ago, 100 years ago.
Atmospheric CO2 was in balance – the earth’s production and absorption keeping pace with each other, in general, and then we started burning fossil fuels, making cement, etc. We’ve shot the concentration from under 320 ppm to 390 in 50 years, and the rate of increase in concentration has gone up as well.
Not saying the sky is falling, but this is a huge change, and CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and we have a part in global warming. I don’t know all the “worry” parts of it, but rising sea levels and flooding are in there, along with water shortages, famine and disease.
In our closed Earth system, resources are finite. Technology is improving at an exponential rate. People are living longer due to better health care. Underdeveloped countries will be moved along forward. Huge sums of resources are going to be needed. More land will be cleared and pavement laid. Human ingenuity is amazing and it’s a good thing. Because we’re going to need all of it we can muster.
By the way. I agree that Simon Ross’ statement was stupid.
Juror, you sound a good deal more optimistic than I am. I see humanity as having to learn the hard way, over and over. You’re definitely correct about finite resources and that “huge sums of resources are going to be needed.”
Last I saw, the US, with less that 5% of the world’s population, was consuming 25% of world resource production, and 40% of the energy. Obviously, not many people can have the standard of living we do, on a worldwide basis. This is at a time when billions of people in China, India, Brazil, some of the Russian republics, etc., are just now getting into the “middle class” and being able to buy cars, washing machines, etc.
Big changes…
Perhaps Victoria Beckham is following in the footsteps of the late sex symbol Jayne Mansfield who gave birth to five children. Jayne Mansfield commented, “I believe a girl can have a baby every year and become more beautiful, have a better figure and lovelier complexion, with each newborn. I am living proof of my theory.”
JM’s breasts grew with her pregnancies. She was known for her narrow waist — something that would seem to be likely to be destroyed by having a baby. However, bodybuilder husband Mickey Hargitay taught JM to exercise with 5-pound weights in such a way as to exercise her abdominal muscles so she got that flat belly back after giving birth.
Doug,
Completely agree. Tough times are surely ahead. I try to be optimistic. Realistically though the odds are stacked against us. Humans definately learn the hard way. So many tough decisions with limited information, projected onto a fluctuating environment. Sadly, tragedies like the Tsunami in Indo, Hurricane Katrina, and the Japan Earthquake/nuclear reactor event are going to increase in frequency.
Juror, one (somewhat) more cheerful thing I can say is that things are almost never really as bad (or as good) as they look. We’re good at muddling through, anyway.
Don’t know what all the fallout will be, but after 50 or 60 years of generally rising expectations in the US – from World War II to just recently – I think we now are truly faced with falling standards of living. For things to not only “not get better,” but to actually get worse – well now, that will take some getting used to.
There’s no point in people trying to reduce their carbon emissions and then increasing them 100% by having another child.
~ Simon Ross, chief executive of UK-based Optimum Population Trust
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I suggest Simon Ross do the evrionmentally and ecologically responsible thing and locate a passing block of sea ice and jump on and wait for nature to take her/his/it’s course.
Or alternatively he could recycle himself and several of his family members and friends by digging a hole with previously owned shovel and jumping in it and waiting for nature to take his/her/it’s course.
But they all need to have their living wills with their DNR’s in place posted at the top of the hole.
As long as they are breathing they are emitting carbon dioxide with each exhale and they are leaving a carbon footprint every where they tread.